Get Your War on TV

Steve Shaviro's blog of March 21 anatomizes the boredom factor of Gulf War II on TV: not that you know what's going to happen before it does, or that the actual war itself is unimportant, but that nothing happens, on camera, right in front of you, in real time, lots of nothing. Tanks rolling endlessly across the sand.

I don't have a TV now, so I've only seen Gulf War II TV silently, in restaurants. I haven't seen the tank footage. I have seen some four-screens-at-once footage. Like the latest in video porn: no narrative, no context, just four screens of simultaneous "action." Or, in this case, inaction: green-lit cities; carrier decks; computer graphics of military helicopters; some Al-Jazeera footage with Arabic uselessly (to me) scrolling by. My experience supports Shaviro's boredom observation; porn is the boredom genre. CNN.com, too, has free news, but entices you to buy the special footage you can only see "by subscription," again like porn, in this case, web porn.

As to Shaviro's question, whether they'll show the carnage on this reality show, he probably knows the answer is no. Wrecked and charred buildings will have to stand in for that, if what I saw today is any indication. The only Iraqis on this show will be live, cheering ones.

On the scrolling stories at the bottom of the screen, it said, just once: "Protestors in NM vow to take the protest to one of Rumsfeld's four residences." Right the f---* on. I hope it's true.

*can I use the seven dirty words on this blog? I mean "f---", not "Rumsfeld." I don't know, I just agreed to the terms of service without reading them.